THE CITY REBORN FROM THE ASHES OF AMERICA'S MOST DISASTROUS FOREST FIRE

Tales from the old-timer

When the Schools Went Bad

It is pretty generally agreed that American schools have gone bad, like a carton of milk left too long on a pantry shelf. The main thing to find out is when they went bad, then to fix them by restoring the tried and true methods used before the collapse.

Our federal government, noted worldwide for far-sighted and successful planning of major national and international programs, has had to step in and force the public schools nationwide to adopt a system of teaching the test or face a judgment of failure of entire school systems based on test outcomes.

The big-city schools show the worst test scores, so the methods used in the central cities public schools should be studied to get to the root of the problem.

According to many critics, the biggest cause is that the teachers are paid too much. The cure may be to cut the pay in order to get better qualified young people to teach.

Top school administrators are now earning salaries in six figures. This is terrible! Anyone with any sense knows that a school can pretty much run itself without all of those principals and administrators running up and down the school halls.

The majority of people believe that the schools were performing well when they went to school, and the downslide began right after they graduated.

A woman friend of mine, now passed away, graduated from Marinette High School in 1927. She worked in personnel in a local paper mill, and observed that most job applicants, though they were high school graduates, could not spell or write a decent sentence, and were puzzled by the simplest questions.

Letters written by Civil War soldiers used crude, phonetic misspellings, and this may indicate the schools went bad even before the 1860 Lincoln administration.

I asked my 5th grade teacher at Peshtigo why the Island of Greenland was much larger in my Geography book map than Australia was, and she had no idea, and didnt much care, so that may indicate the problem went back to as far as 1933, as she had no idea of what the Mercator Projection was, an attempt to show a spherical surface in a flat projection, with the resultant distortion of size and distances in the far northern hemisphere.

Since American science and industry are producing technical marvels at an astonishing pace, and we even have put men on the Moon, we can only conclude that the designers and engineers, the real brains behind this progress, either were from foreign countries where the schools had not yet gone bad, or that the brilliant minds producing these astounding technical advances were home schooled by their parents.

Peshtigo TimesWEB Poll!Wisconsin lawmakers passed a bill with a 76-22 vote that would increase the maximum speed limit to 70 mph in approved areas. Do you agree that the speed limit should be increased?